Tag: Aerospace

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How to lift Washington’s aerospace industry

Jay Inslee
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, shown here with Boeing’s Everett plant in the background, says he intends to keep the state on the “cutting edge” in aerospace. (Credit: Jay Inslee via Flickr)

LYNNWOOD, Wash. – Washington Gov. Jay Inslee today laid out a down-to-earth prescription for keeping the Evergreen State competitive in the aerospace industry, which a new report says is having a steady economic impact.

“I’ve lived here for 65 years, and I’ve never been more confident about aerospace and the future in the state of Washington,” the first-term Democratic governor told an audience here at the 11th annual Governor’s Aerospace Summit, presented by the Aerospace Futures Alliance of Washington.

A draft assessment, prepared by Seattle-based Community Attributes for the Washington Aerospace Partnership, estimates the state aerospace industry’s total impact during 2015 at $94.7 billion in revenues, which is 9.4 percent above the previous year’s figure.

Employment in aerospace and related industries was estimated at 136,100 jobs in 2015, up from 132,500 in 2012. That doesn’t include the impact of Boeing workforce reductions that were announced this year.

When indirect effects such as spending by aerospace workers are taken into account, the employment impact rises to 252,800 jobs.

The report says aerospace employees earned an average wage of $107,000, not including benefits, which is nearly twice the state’s overall average wage of $54,000.

“This report shows us why we must remain vigilant in our efforts to protect and grow the aerospace industry in Washington,” said John Thornquist, director of the state’s Office of Aerospace.

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Spike is still up in the air on supersonic jet factory

Spike Aerospace jet
An artist’s conception shows Spike Aerospace’s S-512 supersonic jet in flight. (Credit: Spike Aerospace)

LYNNWOOD, Wash. – Boston-based Spike Aerospace is moving a bit more slowly than planned on its process to pick the site for a supersonic jet factory, the company’s top executive said today.

Washington state is still in the mix, but so are seven other states, said Vik Kachoria, Spike’s president and CEO.

“We’re not moving to Washington state just yet,” Kachoria said here at the Governor’s Aerospace Summit, presented by the Aerospace Futures Alliance of Washington. “Each region offers something interesting that we want to explore.”

At one time, the company had hoped to start narrowing down the field from Washington, Oregon, California, Texas, Florida, Massachusetts and the Carolinas by the end of this year. But Kachoria told GeekWire that the “down-select” would have to wait until 2017.

He also the schedule for building a subscale supersonic demonstrator would slip from mid-2018 to early 2019.

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Balloons rise up on the strato-frontier

Project Loon
Project Loon’s balloons are getting better at staying in one place. (Credit: Project Loon via YouTube)

Drones, satellites and rocket planes are all well and good for high-flying missions, but sometimes the best craft for the job is a balloon.

Google’s Project Loon, for example, is enlisting machine learning to pilot its experimental data-beaming balloons through the stratosphere. And other ventures are using high-altitude balloon platforms to conduct missions traditionally associated with suborbital rocket launches.

Get a quick rundown on three ventures that are pushing the envelope.

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Paul Allen’s top space exec leaves Vulcan

Chuck Beames
Vulcan Aerospace’s Chuck Beames talks about spaceflight during a 2014 panel discussion in Mojave, Calif., marking the 10th anniversary of SpaceShipOne’s flights. (XPRIZE via YouTube)

Aerospace veteran Chuck Beames is leaving his post as president of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s spaceflight company, Vulcan Aerospace.

Word of Beames’ departure came from Allen in an internal email that was sent to Vulcan employees and obtained by GeekWire today. Allen said Jean Floyd, the CEO of Vulcan’s Stratolaunch Systems, will expand his role to become Vulcan Aerospace’s interim executive director as well.

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Drone industry council meets for first time

Drone in North Cascades
Freefly Systems’ Alta drone takes to the air in Washington’s North Cascades. (Credit: Freefly Systems)

Washington state officials convened the first meeting of an industry council focusing on drones and related businesses today, after a seminar on the promise and potential perils of unmanned aerial vehicles.

“Focusing on this isn’t just about aerospace and UAVs, it’s about a whole variety of industries that benefit,” Brian Bonlender, director of the Washington State Department of Commerce, told a gathering of business executives, researchers and other experts at the offices of K&L Gates in downtown Seattle.

About a dozen of the attendees went from the large-group gathering to the inaugural meeting of the Unmanned Systems Industry Council, led by John Thornquist, head of Washington state’s Office of Aerospace.

Drones, also known as unmanned aircraft systems or UAS, are expected to have an impact on fields ranging from package delivery to agriculture, media production and public safety.  Nationwide, the UAS industry is expected to create 100,000 jobs and add more than $82 billion to the U.S. economy over the decade ahead.

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Jet gets dropped off at museum … literally!

Blue Angels jet unloaded
A Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet jet is raised up from a flatbed truck using a crane at the Museum of Flight. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

The latest addition to the Museum of Flight’s airplane collection, a Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet jet, landed in Seattle today with the aid of a three-story-high crane.

The No. 2 jet, which is on permanent loan from the National Naval Air Museum in Pensacola, Fla., didn’t make the trip the way it did last year, by air. Instead, it was driven to Jet City on the back of a flatbed truck, over the course of six days.

The truck driver, Buddy Chapman of Blossom, Texas, said the sight caused a traffic jam wherever he stopped.

“You’d stop in the littlest town in Wyoming, and you wouldn’t be there but five minutes and you’d have 30 people around it,” he told GeekWire.

While aviation buffs and their kids watched, the truck pulled into a museum parking lot behind the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery, accompanied by a police escort. Sections of the detached wings were offloaded using a forklift, and then the giant crane pulled in to lift the jet off the back of a truck and set it back down.

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Blue Angels jet will be trucked to Seattle

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The U.S. Navy Blue Angels perform at Seafair 2015 in Seattle. (GeekWire photo by Kevin Lisota)

A 30-year-old Navy F/A-18 Hornet jet that’s been through combat duty as well as a dozen years with the Blue Angels is being packed up in Florida for ground delivery to Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

Museum spokesman Ted Huetter told GeekWire that the partially disassembled airplane will travel from the Blue Angels’ home base at Pensacola Naval Air Station by truck. “It is going to be making its way across the country this week,” he said today.

Arrival is expected sometime in the Aug. 21-23 time frame. Huetter said the museum is planning to provide updates on the shipment’s progress via social media.

The Navy is phasing out the Hornets, and the Blue Angels’ fleet is expected to get anupgrade to the heavier F/A-18E and F/A-18F Super Hornets by as early as next year.

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Solar Impulse crosses Atlantic to land in Spain

Image: Piccard and Borschberg
Solar Impulse co-founders Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg salute the crowd after Piccard landed the Solar Impulse 2 airplane in Seville, Spain. (Credit: Zayed Energy Prize via Twitter)

The world’s most traveled fuel-free airplane, Solar Impulse 2, made better time than expected and landed in Spain today, leaving only 10 percent of its round-the-world odyssey to go.

“The Atlantic has always been the symbol of going from the Old World to the New World,” Solar Impulse co-founder and pilot Bertrand Piccard said after landing in Seville. “And everybody has tried to cross the Atlantic – with sailboats, steamboats, airships, airplanes, balloons, even rowboats and kitesurfs. Today, it’s a solar-powered airplane for the first time ever, flying electric, with no fuel and no pollution.”

Piccard was expected to take 90 hours to cross from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Seville, but he made the trip in only a little more than 71 hours.

“Only” is a relative term: A commercial airline flight from New York to Seville takes less than 11 hours, including a stopover in Madrid. But speed isn’t the point of Solar Impulse’s round-the-world odyssey. Rather, it’s sustainability.

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Solar Impulse plane gets New York photo op

Image: Solar Impulse
The Solar Impulse 2 airplane flies high over the Statue of Liberty. (Credit: Solar Impulse)

The Solar Impulse 2 airplane finished up more than seven weeks of flying across America with an overnight hop to New York City that sets the stage for a climactic Atlantic crossing.

Solar Impulse co-founder and pilot Andre Borschberg took off from Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania at 11:18 p.m. ET (8:18 p.m. PT) Friday. The timing was dictated by the weather as well as the logistics required to get the airplane through the East Coast’s normally crowded airspace during the middle of the night.

“I’m looking forward to seeing Lady Liberty,” Borschberg said after takeoff.

Borschberg required only a couple of hours to travel less than 100 miles from Lehigh Valley to New York, and then did a series of photo ops over New York landmarks.

The plane flew over the Statue of Liberty around 2 a.m. ET Saturday (11 p.m. PT Friday), and the plane landed at 3:59 a.m. ET (12:59 a.m. PT) at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

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Boeing designs solar plane that could fly forever

Image: Boeing solar plane
An artist’s concept shows Boeing’s solar-powered plane taking off. (Credit: PatentYogi via YouTube)

Aerospace companies have been trying for years to create a solar-powered plane that can fly at high altitudes for years at a time, and now Boeing has come up with an unorthodox design that just might work.

If it does work, that would smooth the way for an application that Facebook and Google are working on as well: sending up high-flying drones that can loiter over a fixed space on Earth to serve as a link for broadband communication services. It almost goes without saying that the concept could have military applications as well.

Last month, engineers at Boeing Phantom Works in California filed a patent application for an electric-powered plane with solar cells covering its wings, including crazy-looking winglets that stick up from the ends. A video from PatentYogi shows off the design, as well as how it could be put to use to deliver Internet, phone and video – even in remote regions where cable can’t be laid.

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